There was a big dustup between Macmillan and Amazon over ebook pricing this weekend. Here is Macmillan CEO John Sargent’s take. And Amazon’s announcement that they were backing down. And Charlie Stross’ great outsider’s view.
Whoever won, ebook pricing is a hot, tough topic. I’ll guess this chess match isn’t over yet, so we’ll [...]
My hypothesis is that DRM is bad for the publishing business, and hence the publishing business should ditch DRM for that reason. The people who are actually studying the impacts of DRM vs no-DRM – O’Reilly and Brian O’Leary leading the charge – seem to suggest that hypothesis is correct. For now, anyway. My read [...]
California to force uni textbooks to come in electronic formats:
Companies that sell textbooks to California universities must offer electronic versions by 2020, under a new state law…
The law, Senate Bill 48, says any individual or company selling textbooks to the University of California, California State University or private colleges must make them available electronically [...]
I’ve got a “Publishing Year in Review” post up over at the BookNet Canada Blog, with a few predictions thrown in at the end:
I started off 2009 with a trip to London, to attend BookCampUK – an unconference about books. While there were big rumblings of fear and hand-wringing about the arrival of the digital [...]
Canadian book retailer Indigo launched Shortcovers, a great mobile reading app and ebook store, at the beginning of 2009.
At the end of 2009 Shortcovers changed into Kobo (one presumes to better capture the international market?):
We have changed our name from Shortcovers to Kobo. Kobo is an anagram of the word “book” and we [...]
Has anyone played around with YouVersion?
It’s:
A revolutionary online Bible that enables community and collaboration like never before. Organize important content; share thoughts, links and videos; and collaborate with others.
There is a quite great mobile app app as well – for the iphone/blackberry/android etc.
So:
- You can comment on any verse of the bible at their [...]
Somehow or other I found my way to this Mike Cane post from July of this year. It’s brilliant stuff – answering the question: what happens when we get over the “will books be digital” bother, and on to the real stuff: What happens next?
Mike argues for, and I am with him all the [...]
Mashable recently published a list of “15 Twitter Users Shaping the Future of Publishing,” compiled by Maria Schneider. I was tickled to be on the list (as @hughmcguire … though most of my publishing tweets happen on @bookoven). It was a great list, and I agree heartily with all the selections (though there were a [...]
Intense day of discussion today about truly making a web of books, at the Internet Archive-sponsored event, Making Books Apparent … which is also the launch of the BookServer:
The BookServer is a growing open architecture for vending and lending digital books over the Internet. Built on open catalog and open book formats, the BookServer model [...]
Writer Joe Konrath, who publishes with Hyperion has some Kindle books published by his publisher; he owns electronic rights to some back-list titles, and he self-published those to Kindle. He’s got a post with some interesting discussion about the value of publishing, royalties etc in the age of the ebook, but more interesting I think [...]
